ASC and BAFTA Go Cuckoo for Chivo

Jose here. In what turned out to be a surprise to absolutely no one, Emmanuel Lubezki managed a historical threepeat from the American Society of Cinematographers who gave him yet another award for his use of natural light in The Revenant (he also won his third straight BAFTA).

Chivo is now the ASC’s biggest winner having earned five awards (out of six nominations) since 1999 (he has only lost for Sleepy Hollow) Somewhere Roger Deakins must be thrilled Lubezki didn’t have any movies out in 2012 (technically To the Wonder came out, but it sadly went by dismissed by most groups), since that year he won his third award for Skyfall and “prevented” Chivo from winning the award every year since 2011 (the Oscar-less Deakins more than doubles Chivo’s ASC nods though, having earned 14, the highest for any ASC member).

Considering Chivo is now the hands on favorite for the Oscar (in what will be yet another rare consecutive threepeat) it might be fruitless to point out that other than for the last two years, ASC and Oscar have had quite some disagreements; since the year 2000, ASC has awarded eight cinematographers their top prize while Oscar has gone a different route. All of those winners were also nominated for the Oscar though, so it’s unlikely we’ll see a Robert Richardson upset this year since ASC went for Janusz Kaminski’s work in Bridge of Spies instead. As The Revenant keeps steamrolling its competition, I can’t help but wish for a glamorous spread of Judy the Bear in Vanity Fair or Vogue sometime soon. Photographed by Chivo of course.  

BAFTA Winners Announced

Since BAFTA never televises live we learn the winners before we've seen any excerpts from the show. This kills the normal suspense (however non-suspenseful) of "and the winner is..." but if you're trying to preserve that we'll hide the winners until after the jump. We'll deal with the details later once we've seen clips!

THE WINNERS ARE...

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Breaking Down Oscar's Production Design Nominees

Adam Stockhausen and Anna Pinnock with their Grand Budapest Hotel OscarsDavid here with a closer look at this year’s Oscar nominees for Production Design. Not too close, mind: this is all about the big picture. The PD is responsible for the entire art department, and as such, the entire visual look and feel of a film. If it’s difficult to separate that idea from what cinematographers and costume designers do, well, that’s the difficulty in awarding all these disciplines as if they act independently of one another. Such is the nature of the awards season beast.

The origin of the title is an amusing, unsurprising fable: William Cameron Menzies, coined it to describe his own function on the set of Gone with the Wind (a mammoth task, to be sure) after David O. Selznick instructed everyone that "Menzies is the final word” on the set on every technical aspect of the visual production. Menzies, incidentally, was the first Oscar winner of the award, under the label ‘Best Interior Decoration’ - the award changed to 'Best Art Direction – Set Decoration’ in 1947, and didn’t become ‘Best Production Design’ until 2012.

As we saw earlier in the week when the Art Directors Guild gave out their awards, the Oscar race seems to be a two-horse race. [More...]

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43rd Annie Award winners

Over the weekend, ASIFA-Hollywood held the 43rd annual Annie Awards, honoring the year in animation. Their complete list of winners is here, but some of the highlights that you should be aware of:

• Pixar's Inside Out, an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature and widely assumed to be the frontunner in that category, had a terrific night, winning 10 awards for everything from its production design to Phyllis Smith's vocal performance as the mopey character Sadness, to Best Animated Feature.

It was a virtually clean sweep of the animated feature categories, interrupted only by...

• Pixar's other film, The Good Dinosaur, which managed to overcome the stigma of being Pixar's first-ever box office bomb to nab the award for Outstanding Animated Effects in an Animated Production.

• Fellow Oscar nominee Boy and the World, the little masterpiece from Brazil that I've raved about before, won the inaugural award for Best Animated Feature-Independent. Hey, whatever it takes to make sure a masterpiece like that gets to walk away with a trophy.

• Continuing its award-winning weekend, The Revenant won an award for Outstanding Character Animation in a Live Action Production for everybody's favorite, Judy the Bear. The Revenant is also nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars, and if it wins, it's going to be mostly on the basis of the same character.

Action Sequences: Man vs Bear, Max vs Furiosa.

The Film Bitch Awards "extra" categories have commenced. We've already discussed Ensembles, Breakthrough, and Casting and now we hit Action Sequences. These are sometimes hard to define as with the much celebrated fourth installment of Mad Max which could be described in its entirety as "chase sequence" but I've tried to break it down a bit for these purposes. Given the choreography, wonder and passion happening on Fury Road the bar was high and even hugely entertaining fight sequences that I thought would be easy placements for the category like the "Hulkbuster" fight in The Avengers: Age of Ultron or technical wows like Johnson vs. Sporino in Creed (all in one continuous shot!) were edged out.

Films with standard action setpieces, whatever their other strengths, like the two biggest blockbusters of the year (The Force Awakens and Jurassic World) or films with inventive brief moments that didn't quite transcend their otherwise rote action beats (Ant-Man) didn't really stand a chance in this high energy competition that put the motion in motion pictures.

Click the image for more on fine action sequences of the past year in cinema